State borders and scrambled spelling (Solution)

Happy Friday, Puzzlers! It's time to solve the puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Let's take another look at the current Sunday Puzzle:

This week's challenge comes from listener Derrick Niederman, of Charleston, S.C. Starting in Montana, you can drive into South Dakota and then into Iowa. Those three states have the postal abbreviations MT, SD, and IA — whose letters can be rearranged to spell AMIDST. The challenge is to do this with four connected states to make an eight-letter word. That is, start in a certain state, drive to another, then another, and then another. Take the postal abbreviations of the four states you visit, mix the letters up, and use them to spell a common eight-letter word. Derrick and I know of only one answer. Can you do this?

As I mentioned in the preview, we need two lists:

1. B: a list of state borders; I used this one;
2. E: an English lexicon; I used this one;

As always, I've posted my solver script to GitHub. The script includes some notes throughout to help explain what it does.

First, my script reduces E to O (for "octo-"?), a list containing only the 8-letter words from the lexicon. E contains 370,103 words. O contains 51,627 words.

Next, it iterates through B (for borders) and produces a new list Q (for "quads"?) of all the sets of four US states that one can drive through consecutively, as described above. There are 967 such four state paths. I think we need at least 2 vowels to spell an 8 letter word, so my script eliminates the four state paths with 0 or 1 vowels, leaving 901 paths.

Finally, it compares every item in Q with every item in O to see if they contain the same 8 letters.

Remember that the host said he was aware of only one solution. Well, my approach found 67 matches! However, some of these are very rare word forms and others are proper nouns---there's a lot of stuff in that lexicon file. That said, I found at least 15 good solutions among the 67. Here they are:

diamonds, mo-ia-sd-nd;

ornament, ar-tn-mo-ne;

nominate, ia-ne-mo-tn;

animator, ar-tn-mo-ia;

condemns, co-ne-sd-mn;

flagrant, ar-tn-ga-fl;

dioramas, ar-mo-ia-sd;

moleskin, il-mo-ne-ks;

eduction, id-ut-co-ne;

nonmetal, al-tn-mo-ne;

ransomed, ar-mo-ne-sd;

tangrams, ar-ms-tn-ga;

moralism, il-mo-ar-ms;

magneton, ga-tn-mo-ne;

nomadism, mn-sd-ia-mo;

I think we can consider this one a success.

Thanks for reading. I'll see you back here for the next Sunday Puzzle!

--Levi